ABSTRACT
Karl Polanyi highlighted the way in which, by the twentieth century, money had come to play a dual role in the international economy, serving both improvement and habitation functions. Central banks, particularly the Bank of England, manipulated the money supply by sterilising capital flows, discouraging convertibility and, in some cases, even by trading gold on the open market – all measures which contravened the logic of the Gold Standard. The nominal value of transactions undertaken in the private circuits of financial money now dwarf public accounts and the technologies of creation, trading and valuation of money in all its forms have shifted further and further towards the control of private financial market actors. Hedge funds were in many ways the archetype for the new era of private sector finance from the 1980s onwards. Over the 1980s and 1990s, hedge funds came to be seen as the power of the private financial industry over state management of the economy.
